shattered
by Gale's Magic Fingers
Summary: /he was her forever baby, but she was just his alternating Tuesday./ ::oneshot:: For Project PULL.


Derrick Harrington doesn't care who you are; he doesn't like you. He'll stomp on your face and eat your heart before you can say you don't actually love him. He knows he can do this from pure experience. If you walk up to a random girl at BOCD, chances are, he's done this to her. He's not a bad person, really. He's just not a people person, and he couldn't care either way.

Derrick doesn't read romance books on the weekend. He hangs out with his friends behind the school they spend so much time trying to escape and does stupid teenage things; drinking, trash-talking, and random mumblings. He doesn't buy his girlfriend flowers when they go on dates. Derrick doesn't pay attention in school, or mind his parents. He says he doesn't like the nickname "Derrington," but his inner attention whore cherishes the fact he's talked about enough to warrant a nickname.

When his parents were out of town, he didn't sit at home doing homework like an obedient son his parents somehow will think of him as. He called everyone in his phone, posted on Facebook "party at my house. seven pm bring da boos," called in several pizzas, cranked up the volume of his stereo system, and threw a party that people would reference at their Ivy League university graduation.

Derrick Harrington is bad news, plain and simple.

She was a vision in anything, especially white. Massie Block could look like an angel in just about everything she wore. She wasn't exactly a saint, but her friends would go to their graves swearing that she was better than that no-good, low-life boyfriend of hers. Every time the subject of "that Harrington boy" was brought up, she'd send a glare to her little group of friends that clearly said, _He isn't making me choose, so if I do, guess whom it'll be_.

She was that typical American girl; she dreamed of growing up and taking the world by storm. She could see herself in ten years, a smile on her face as she walked across the stage to receive her doctorate, Derrick sitting in the front row, struggling to restrain little Daniel as he tried to run for his mommy. She would smile to the crowd as they cheered. Flash forward fifteen years, and she's President of United States. It's an honor, really. The First Female President: Massie Harrington. She would see not-so-little-anymore Daniel going off to college with a tears in her eyes. The only thing that would comfort her would be the butterfly kiss of her ten-year-old daughter, Anna Leigh.

Massie Block was a planner. It was obvious to all. The one thing she didn't expect was for Derrick Harrington to ruin all her perfectly constructed, set in stone plans. She foolishly believed she had changed him.

* * *

It all started on an all but normal Saturday morning in the beginning of December. Massie was doing final Christmas preparations and helping clean up her boyfriend's house after the party they had thrown last night. His parents would be home is a little over four hours, and they had a lot of work to do. Their little band of friends could only clean so fast.

It was after she had finished with the bathroom —_ew. _She had better get a freaking necklace out of this— and she was walking into the kitchen that she saw it. There he was, in all his Derrick Harrington glory, caught in a lip lock with who she could only assume was a trashy blonde in a black shirt. _Her black shirt._

And so it was Claire. Of course.

Massie stumbled blindly out of the contemporary glass house and walked down the long drive. When she met the road, she pulled out her cell phone and called Isaac. He pulled up ten minutes later and when she opened the door to the back seat of the Range Rover, he held out a bottle of water and an aspirin. She waved them away.

"It's okay, Isaac," she said. "I'm not drunk."

He looked like he didn't believe her, but he shrugged it off. "Where's Miss Claire?"

"She decided she wanted to go shopping with Dylan today. I'm tired, so I decided I wanted to come home."

The man who was like a father to her just sighed and drove off.

* * *

Massie waited for a week or so before she confronted him. They were going to see a movie whose name she couldn't really care about at this point. He showed up at her house promptly — which, for him, is forty-five minutes late. He rang her doorbell and when she opened it, he was standing there with an apologetic look on his face and purple lilies —she thought she had changed him, she really had — in his hand. She almost wanted to drop all her worries and anger and leap into his arms, to ride off into the sunset. Then she flashed back to the party and his arms around Claire, and all friendly feelings went up in smoke. She casually walked out of her house, took the flowers from his hands, and walked up to his car. She didn't even wait for him to open the door for her.

The ride to the theater was extremely silent and even more awkward. They arrived just in time for the movie and found their seats just as the previews end. It was a terribly childish movie, and she knew that Derrick enjoyed every moment of it. He offered her some buttered popcorn, but she denied it. Massie just sat there like the Ice Queen most people know her to be.

She's in the car before he's out of the bathroom at the end of the movie. She waited until they were well on their way back to her house before she asked the question that had been eating at her all week: "How long has this been going on?"

He barely registered that she had spoken. "Hmm?"

"How long has this been going on?" she repeated. "How long have you been cheating on me?"

At this point, he knew he was caught. With any other person, he would have easily lied his way out of it, but this is Massie Block. She looked out the window as the lights of Westchester flit through the window, never there for more than a second or two. Massie could sense him leaning forward to turn on the radio. After sifting through several static-filled stations before settling on a station playing and old The Ramones song. It was silent between them, nothing but tension passing from one to the other. Then: "Do you remember when we started going back out again?"

His voice kind of shocked her out of a mini-reverie. "Right after the second semester of eight grade began." she recalled, fiddling with the promise ring that she had just put on to make a point tonight.

"Yeah, and do you remember the party we went to celebrate spring break a couple months later?" he said, looking over at Massie but seeing nothing but her chocolate-colored hair.

Massie felt the horror building up in her throat, threatening to explode. "Yes."

"It was then. Skye was visiting from Alpha Academy, and…well, that was quite a wild party."

And that was when Massie Block's world shattered again. She didn't even listen to the rest of Derrick's tale, not wanting to hear his empty excuses. However, she did decide that she wasn't going to let him ramble and try to talk his way out of this.

"Three years."

He looked a bit angered at being interrupted, but he shrugged it off. "What, Mass?"

"_Don't_ call me 'Mass,' okay? You've been cheating on me for _three fucking years_, Derrick. You lost the right to call me anything but Massie."

"Mas-Massie, why are you being like this?"

"I thought I was going to marry you," she whispered, hoping he wouldn't hear. He did.

"Massie, I have every intention to marry you, I swear —"

"Why, so you can cheat on me then, too?" she interrupted.

"It'd be different, I promise." He was begging now.

"You're right, it would be. You'd have to pay them, then." She took off the promise ring —the one she originally wore on the first day of ninth grade — and put it into his palm.

"You really should keep your hands on the wheel, Harrington," she said, turning to stare out the window into the dark night.

* * *

He dropped her off ten minutes later, with no promise of return. It was a strange feeling, to not have a promise of seeing him the next day, or even the next week. She watched in silence as he drove off for the last time. She choked down tears as the lights of his car fell out of her eyesight and she slid down the gate. She sat there in silence for a few minutes, thinking of the last three years of her life, and how they were ruined memories, destined to be forgotten for the sake of her sanity. She thought about her future, how she had sworn she'd marry the boy in shorts way back in seventh grade. The boy in shorts had grown up to be the man in jeans that had just broken her heart, and probably not for the last time. It'd hurt her every time she would she would catch a glance of him with some other girl, every time she saw him in the hallway and his arm was not around her. Derrick Harrington had scarred her for life.

She continued to sit there for a moment or seven hundred before dragging herself into her mansion and up the stairs. She passed by the dining room and could absently hear her parents bickering. She walked up the stairs and down the hall, before dragging herself into her immaculate white bedroom. She collapsed onto her purple duvet and let the first of the tears fall.

There would be many more to come.

* * *

**OHAITHAR. :D**

**I'm aware the characters are a little OOC. Sorry.**

**Thanks to Lux Mentis Scientia for betaing this, and putting up with me nagging her about betaing this. [/innocent]**

**This update is for Project PULL, and _oh my God, I finally got it done_.**

**More information can be found on mine or Bookaholic711's profile.**

**Knthnxbai.**


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